“We’re teaching intelligence teams to consider force-on-force warfare and counterinsurgency warfare. We want the intelligence teams to focus on the larger picture and not just on small attacks from insurgency forces,” said Staff Sgt. Jamie Espinoza, all source intelligence analyst and instructor, Foundry Intelligence Training Center, Fort Carson. “It’s about making everybody understand that cross communication is important in a fight.”

“The biggest push is to get higher echelons to communicate efficiently with subordinate intelligence teams,” said Espinoza.

Establishing company intelligence support teams gives commanders the ability to rapidly respond to changes during a fight, according to Capt. Benjamin Martin, intelligence officer, 3rd ABCT.

“We don’t know what our next fight is going to be, but if we have small intelligence teams with each company, that could help that company commander quickly answer his questions, (they) would allow us to speed up the process of analyzing intelligence,” Martin said.

Now that the Army has transitioned more toward decisive action missions, this training helps to mold the mindset of Soldiers in regards to intelligence analysis, he said.

“We’ve got intelligence database platforms systems feeding (information) into a common picture that we can push back out to the battalions and COISTs,” Martin said. “So, we’re using bottom-up information refinement as well as top-down intelligence assets to create a picture for commanders to use for operations.”

Although, intelligence systems and databases are great sources of information, they shouldn’t be the sole sources of intelligence, Martin said.

“If the warfighters and line units are seeing something at their level that we can corroborate up here at the brigade level, then it’s good intelligence,” Martin said. “Maybe they’re seeing something that we’re not able to see. So, this way we’re not relying solely on our technical assets, but also on the human element.”

The job of a COIST is to analyze intel and recommend courses of action to the commander, said Pfc. Paul Frisby, cavalry scout, Troop B, 4th Squadron, 10th Cavalry Regiment, 3rd ABCT.

“It’s a cool experience to take what I know as a scout and apply it,” Frisby said. “As scouts we gather intelligence, but as a COIST member, I understand why I gathered such intelligence now.’

Decisive action is not just counterinsurgency or foreign conventional fight.

“It’s simultaneous operations that focus across any kind of spectrum where We might expect a fight,” said Sierra. “So, it’s not just counter­insurgency specific.

“At the end of this training, intelligence sections (at each echelon) will have the initial understanding as to what the basics are for them and they’ll have the standard operating procedures that track the flow of information through the intelligence system,” said Sierra. “They’ll continue to focus on the basics but in increasingly complex environments.”

Cooperative effort from both military and civilian leadership across Fort Carson made the training possible.

“This training is a great opportunity for Soldiers working in intelligence to strengthen individual, collective skills,” said Richard Cayemberg, mission manager and deputy director, Foundry Intelligence Training Center, Fort Carson.

The “Iron” Brigade commander expressed his appreciation of all the contributors that made this training possible.

“I’m really proud of the leaders across the brigade and the post that helped pull this together,” Sierra said. “This kind of training hadn’t been done on this post before and it’s the leaders who have planned, prepared and executed this. It’s setting a baseline for the basics but also a pretty high bar for similar future training events.”